Abstract
The sustainable mobility vision for city-regions proposes a more integrated and ‘seamless’ multi-modal public transport system around quality neighborhoods, shifting mobility to soft transportation modes and to public transport at various scales. Existing models of sustainable urban form address this challenge focusing on the location, density and diversity of activities, on the composition of the street layout, and on the presence of transport nodes and the quality of the public transport service. In order to better understand the relation between urban form and sustainable mobility patterns we propose to additionally measure the structure of mobility networks, including network proximity, density and accessibility, for different transport modes. The analysis of a multi-modal network model of the Randstad region in the Netherlands, integrating private and public transport infrastructure networks and land use information, reveals the structures of modality in the city-region. These structures are used to identify a typology of ‘modality environments’ that tested against travel survey data demonstrate support for specific patterns of mobility, i.e. walking, cycling, car use, local and regional transit. This classification can contribute to a new urban form based method for evaluating the potential of neighborhoods for sustainable mobility.
